The Datafication of Work: How L&D Can Use Big and Small Data to Improve Performance

As new AI powered tools hit the mainstream, HR departments are seeing an increased datafication of work. Data now supports everything from improving performance to informing decisions.

But not all data is the same. Some data sets are massive. They provide a broad view of macro trends, industry forces, or—especially for large enterprises—companywide patterns. We know this as “big data.”

On the other hand, there are smaller data sets that can provide insights about individual offices, individual projects, or even individual workers. While you’re never going to be able to train a machine learning AI on this “small data,” it can be just as valuable—if you know how to use it.

Understanding Big and Small Data

Big data analytics provides nearly unlimited opportunities to understand behaviors, habits, the needs of customers, and countless other trends to gain insights into patterns and predict behaviors.

However, trends and patterns don’t tell us everything. If we want to understand individual needs, trends can only tell us so much. This is where so-called small data becomes important.

Small data focuses on individual people or small groups, which is necessary for individualization and personalization. While big data is often cold number crunching, small data is about the little things: conversations, feedback, emotions, reactions, and drivers. Martin Lindstrom, a brand strategist and author of the influential book Small Data: The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends, says, “Where Big Data is all about drawing correlations, Small Data is about identifying causation.”

Even the US Federal Reserve, an organization known for taking a big data approach to monetary policy, values small data. They publish the Beige Book eight times per year to “gather anecdotal information on current economic conditions,” which the board of governors then uses alongside big data economic trends to inform policy.

The purpose is “to add color to what’s happening in the economy,” says Emily Kerr, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The same truth holds when companies combine big and small data analytics in their human resources departments.

Data’s Role in Learning and HR

When it comes to using data to support employees and the business in general, there are countless cases for using both big and small data analytics. For HR and Learning departments, this often takes the form of people analytics. According to a Deloitte report, “More than 80 percent of organizations indicate that people analytics is an important or very important priority.” That’s because this type of analytics helps to optimize the people side of the business.

Deloitte, PwC, and others commission global surveys annually and analyze big data sets to reveal macro trends in workplace changes, leadership strategies, and HR in general. These analyses provide us with a great overview of modern practices and a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t. The insights also inform executives about which systems or processes are worth investing in.

On the other hand, each company is unique, with its own organizational culture, goals, and people. For enterprises, each region, each office, and each team can also be unique.

Understanding trends is one thing, but understanding how the trends impact your company and industry is a completely different thing. This requires a deep understanding of smaller internal data, both qualitative and quantitative, that takes into account your workforce makeup, current technology stack, and level of agility.

Cisco is a great example of a company that is leveraging small data to create big changes. By carefully analyzing external big data, they realized they needed to transform on many levels, from introducing continuous employee reskilling to shifting the culture toward forward-thinking services. A change to a data-driven mindset was required.

Cisco decided to “hack” it.

During a 24-hour-long global hackathon called the HR Breakathon, 800 employees, representing all departments in 39 countries, brainstormed new approaches to how Cisco’s HR could drive employee excellence. The outcome: the hackathon resulted in 105 mini projects born out of all kinds of easily accessible small data lying around offices. This included feedback forms, exit interviews, reviews, surveys, and statistical anomalies.

In the words of Gianpaolo Barozzi, Senior HR Director at Cisco, “One of the key targets was not to provide people with any direction. We simply asked them to ‘break’ those little, everyday things that stopped them from delivering the people experience we want to give.”

The result actually went above and beyond the primary goal. Fran Katsoudas, Chief People Officer at Cisco, believes the hackathon is actively changing the mindset of employees. They now feel more empowered to make changes, and the culture shifts that came out of the hackathon “fuel their energy to think of all the little and big things that could be changed.”

Humanizing Massive Amounts of Data

This humanization of processes, and understanding the impact of small data, is especially important in learning and development today. Fueled by the incredible growth of AI-supported e-learning, microlearning, VR, AR, gamification, social learning, and especially machine learning, the value of interaction and the use of small data for proper personalization are absolute musts.

With 90 properties around the world in a wide variety of locations and situations, Ritz-Carlton’s learning programs are centered around making sure that best practices spread companywide. The luxury brand keeps a database of more than 1,000 innovative best practices and service ideas tailored to the needs of their VIP clients based on their habits, usual wishes, and special requests. Staff use this data not only to provide best-in-class service to those clients but also to try to understand patterns, their cause and effect, and how they all contribute to company goals.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is another set of technologies that can be used to humanize data and optimize workforce performance. These smart devices are equipped with data-gathering sensors that can be used to track, measure and identify opportunities to improve employee well-being, improve the recruitment process, enhance productivity, and make the workplace safer.

However, it’s important to keep in mind that there are both privacy and security risks that accompany every IoT implementation. All IoT data should be anonymized and aggregated, and workers should have an opportunity to opt in or opt out of IoT programs that collect sensitive data like personal health information.

The real value is unlocked once learning departments begin collecting and analyzing these various data sets. For example, they can build immersive learning programs that combine AR, AI, and other technologies to provide employees with personalized and efficient onboarding, logistics planning and safety-focused L&D programs.

Putting Analytics into Practice

Small data analytics are unique data sets that often contain an organization’s “secret sauce” or breakout opportunities.

Collecting small data can also be built into the daily culture of a company and continuously tapped via internal forums, training evaluations, feedback forms, and other sources. Leveraging small data can lead to powerful, transformative insights, so don’t be afraid to use it in our big data world.

For more information on how to implement both big and small learning and development analytics, watch our webinar on Putting Analytics into Practice, presented with Kirkpatrick Partners and Discover’s HR Analytics lead.